Many long-time Office users will be unwilling to transition away from the apps they’re so used to working with. Whether you’re an Office veteran or a complete newcomer to these types of apps, iWork may deserve another chance. Let’s take a look at why.

Of course, Office 365 does offer you access to a number of other apps, including Outlook, Publisher, and Access, but these are niche apps that many people don’t need anyway.

iWork comes with every qualifying Mac purchased after October 2014 for free. It’s hard to beat that. If your Mac is older and you need to download the suite from the App Store, you’ll pay $20 per app for a total of $60, still cheaper than Office. Most iPads and iPhones get iWork for free, too.

2. Cleaner Interface

Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are very powerful tools, and their interfaces are absolutely jam-packed full of options and menus. If you’re a power user, this can be a good thing; you have quick access to all of the myriad settings you could want.

But the majority of users don’t need all of the options that are available. Managing references, text elements, and mathematical equations aren’t common concerns among most office suite users. I’d be willing to bet that at least 95% of Word users have never needed to adjust the hyphenation zone.

The top of the Pages window, for example, has Insert, Table, Chart, Text, Shape, Media, and Comment buttons. That’s pretty much everything you need for word processing. Both Numbers and Keynote are similarly sparse when it comes to menubar options.

You can see in the comparison shots above and below just how much cleaner the iWork apps are. Seeing the Office apps next to them makes it obvious just how much clutter Microsoft’s apps have.

If you’re thinking to yourself “But I always need to adjust the Style settings in Word!” then you might not be a good candidate for switching to iWork. There is a sacrifice in power that you’ll make for these cleaner interfaces.

But for the majority of people, the tools available in the iWork apps are sufficient, and this makes them easier to use. There are many other options available through the menus, so it’s not like you’re giving up every customizable option. Just most of the ones you don’t need.

By keeping all of your documents from Pages, Numbers, and Keynote saved in iCloud, you can work on them from any computer connected to the internet. You can even work on them from your iPhone, or non-Apple devices via iCloud.com.

Having access to mobile versions of these apps is also a big benefit. You can use Microsoft Office for free on your 9.7″ iPad, but on a Mac it requires an Office 365 subscription. Apple’s office productivity suite may be less powerful, but it’s also more financially viable if you don’t need all that power.

While you may encounter an occasional difficulty with formatting, you aren’t likely to run into any serious problems. You don’t have to worry about your colleagues who use Microsoft Office having difficulty with your files.

Will You Make the Switch?

If you haven’t tried iWork in a while, I strongly recommend that you give it a shot in the near future. Unless you’re a serious power user of Microsoft Office, you might find that the cleaner interface and the better integration with the Mac operating environment makes it a winner!

Do you use iWork? Or will you be sticking with Office? What made you decide either way? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Yes, when your kids are in university, Office 365 is a really good choice. Especially if you only pay $100 for three people. Students often get a discount, too, so it could even get a little cheaper. If you don't absolutely need Office products, though, iWork is still a solid alternative. I would imagine that, at least most of the time, they could get away without Office. There might be some situations where that would make things difficult, but it depends largely on what professors require.

I have to agree with Danny on this. I've used Microsoft Office all my adult business life and the past 12 years have been on a Mac. I currently have an Office 365 subscription, but I recently changed to iWork and to me there is no better feeling than using iWork apps with the ubiquity of iCloud. Everything just "feels" right and even more importantly, with the user interface of these three apps it also "looks" right. As Dann said, the apps are so clean looking and not confounded with a myriad of features that 90% of users won't find helpful. For me it's not about the money, but I have the family subscription of Office 365 so I do save some money each year.

Yes, I have a boatload of storage in OneDrive with my Office 365 account, but OneDrive is a very slow synching cloud service that I could never warm up to. I just use Dropbox, even though I could use iCloud...but that's not what iCloud is designed for. Dropbox is the number one cloud synching service in the world for many good reasons.

I have to interface and collaborate with many folks who use Microsoft Office, both on Windows and Macs. I have never had a problem exporting an iWork document to a Microsoft Office document. Admittedly, I have downloaded all the Microsoft fonts onto my Mac, but this is free and anyone can do it in a matter of minutes.

Yes, Google Apps is also an option. I haven't been super impressed with their apps, though; I'm not sure exactly what it is. I do use them on occasion, but the online limitations and interfaces just don't do it for me.

I remember previously when I used iWork-iCloud integration during my uni masters days back somewhere in 2011-2012. Back then it was a 'wow' factor, & I jumped in. Saved lots & lots of references & articles for my thesis.
But then they 'revamped' iCloud WITHOUT any warning whatsoever, and I lost most of my references. And it happened to many, just google it.
Yes I should have had copies on local hard drive, I've learnt.
My biggest gripe was that I've emailed them for help, and only got 'We regret for your inconvenience and go this webpage for troubleshooting' which didn't help. Or perhaps I'm living outside US, which may be not important commercially.

I like the Apple Office suite, but it is quit unfair and also a little bit bluffing to use the OLD Microsoft Office 2011 for your screenshots as there exist a very newer one Microsoft Office 2016 for Mac. Not really good journalism ...

They did not talk about 1 TB free storage which comes with Office 365.
Also at the cost of around $80 per month, you get five TB space with five license.
Did I add Skype credits to send SMS or call someone over internet?

Getting storage space with Office 365 is one of the perks, but you do also get iCloud storage. It's not a huge amount, but I don't think many people are really in the position of needing more cloud storage at the moment. There's just so much free storage out there that paying for it seems a little ridiculous!

First your title is incomplete and because article is directed to noobs and it must be explicitly mentioned there. Don't generalize your opinion.

Fair point many people don't need more space. Define what you do you mean by 'many'? Who really comes in that category? These days I see noobs uploading videos to YouTube. They must want to back up the original copies.

You are a journalist please cite your sources before speaking your mind. Please conduct a survey to see amount of space people desire in their device.

Didn't you notice the Apple had bumped amount of store present in iPhone. Open your eyes.

Also you are forgetting that reliability of MS Office has been an industry standard. No questions there.

I appreciate your honesty in the comment below. But don't you think it is unfair to misjudge something at your standpoint. You can always get a 30 day trial version before making your opinion about it.

Dann Albright

October 19, 2016 at 11:03 pm

That's a fair point. But because I have iWork, I haven't felt compelled to buy Office 2016!